


Alicorn

by Lomonaaeren



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Dubious Consent, Heavy Angst, M/M, Minor Character Death, Multiple Universes Colliding, Slavery, Stockholm Syndrome, Time Travel, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-22
Updated: 2016-05-22
Packaged: 2018-06-10 00:58:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6931438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lomonaaeren/pseuds/Lomonaaeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Narcissa invokes her life-debt—and offers her help—to ask Harry to take Draco into hiding in the past, strange things happen. Like fractured tripartite universes. And slave bonds. And rescues of Harry from the Dursleys. Even when there’s more than one Harry. And more than one Draco.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alicorn

**Author's Note:**

> Written for versatillite in the 2016 Serpentinelion Glompfest. I hope you enjoy, and that it’s not too confusing. Thanks to Karen for the beta and to L. for offering, even though she didn’t have time. Heed the warnings in the tags, please; they don't apply to every universe, but there's something of them in at least one.

There is more than one way of being true.  
  
One way of being true that wizards of Britain knew, and know, about is that drinking a unicorn’s blood offers a cursed life. Better to take it as a gift, if the unicorn will give it. And the same with hairs from their tails, and the shards of their hooves, and the light from their eyes.  
  
But their horns are the most dreaded, as they are the most precious, of all.   
  
One true thing that wizards of Britain do not normally know: alicorn, gleaming heavy and still on the forehead of a dead unicorn or a live one, cleaves open all possibilities as its tip cuts through time. Unicorns seem to pass from shadow to shadow and melt into the distance not just because of inherent grace, but because they flow from moment to moment. Alicorn opens the path, and unicorns choose one, making others collapse and become nothing more than fate-glimmers until the unicorn turns in a different direction.  
  
For a wizard, however, the paths might be endless, the possibilities all borne in motion at once, all true.  
  
But a path must still have a beginning, at least for time-bound creatures like humans.  
  
This is one.  
  
*  
  
Harry didn’t move after Narcissa told him what she wanted him to do. He looked around the huge, bare room in Malfoy Manor. She needed a favor from him, but she still couldn’t bring herself to take him into the rooms where portraits hung and people lived, he thought. This was the dining room that he knew Voldemort had had Nagini eat people in.   
  
_The kinds of articles that came out, after the war.  
  
_ Well, _had_ come out, before the papers turned so sharply against former Death Eaters that throwing them to sharks would have been kinder.  
  
Harry reached out and picked up the collar from Narcissa’s hand. He heard her breathe out, and then she bowed her head. She was kneeling in front of him. It was the only way she had brought him anywhere close to agreeing.  
  
“I’m not agreeing,” he told her.  
  
“Of course not,” she agreed.  
  
Harry glared at her, and then looked more closely at the collar. It was made of some silken-smooth, bone-colored material, but it didn’t feel like bone. _Ivory,_ he decided at last. The chased inlay around it were silver, and there was a clasp that was studded with tiny, deep green stones that had even tinier spots of red.  
  
“Bloodstones,” Narcissa said. Harry looked up and noticed her watching him with clever eyes through that long tangle of almost-white hair. “They channel and funnel the Dark magic without its hurting the possessor.”  
  
“What’s the collar made of?” Harry shifted it and watched it sparkle. It looked huge for a human neck, but Narcissa had assured him it was “the right size,” whatever that meant.   
  
“Unicorn horn.”  
  
Harry actually tried to throw the collar at her, but Narcissa caught it and shook her head. “The silver and the bloodstones neutralize the curse that comes with taking alicorn that wasn’t given freely,” she said. “In fact, that curse is an integral part of its design. It _has_ to be that way, or it couldn’t function as a slavery collar.”  
  
“And you want me to make your son a slave and take him to hide in the past.” It didn’t get less mental no matter how often Harry said it.  
  
“Yes.” Narcissa still didn’t get up from her kneeling position. “It’s the safest place, Mr. Potter. I know they would find him at the home of anyone who still sheltered him. He is the only one who has the Dark Mark on his arm and is still walking free. My husband is dying in Azkaban. So are the others, or they’ve been executed.”  
  
“I know that,” Harry snapped, and scratched the back of his neck. It hurt like fury, as if he wore a collar of his own. “But if we go back in time, and change it that way, how is it going to save him? I mean, what happens to the younger version of him then? Does he just cease to exist?”  
  
“If he wears the collar…yes.” Narcissa stood up. “There will be two versions of you present there. But not him. He will seem to vanish someday, and his parents will never know what became of him.”  
  
“I’m surprised you’re willing to do that,” said Harry, a little shaken.  
  
“I care for the woman I am, not the woman I was.”  
  
 _And that would do it,_ Harry thought. He looked at the collar again, dangling limply in Narcissa’s hand now. She started spinning it slowly at the tips of her fingers, as if she imagined the silver and bloodstones glinting in the light would make it more attractive to him, instead of horrifying.  
  
“What kind of slavery is this, exactly?” Harry asked, and knew his tone was abrupt, from the way Narcissa stopped the spin of the collar, but he couldn’t care. “Does it mean that I’m going to be able to command him to do things, or have complete control of his life, or read his thoughts, or what?”  
  
Narcissa smiled as if she knew that was the moment he agreed. It probably was, Harry thought later, when they were in the same dining room and he was watching Narcissa clasp the collar around Malfoy’s neck, with whispered instructions in his ear. It probably was.  
  
*  
  
The alicorn of that collar opens up different paths. All of them have certain things in common.  
  
All of them involve Draco Malfoy wearing a cursed collar, and Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter traveling in time. And all of them involve a certain bond developing between them, necessitated by the nature of the collar itself.  
  
None of those paths are exactly the same. All of them can be affected by decisions, narrowed and made anew by others, and none of them can be seen as morally superior to the others. None are better than others.  
  
Except, perhaps, for the people who must live through them.  
  
*  
  
Draco opened his eyes and turned on his side to look at Harry. There was a stretching and straining and stickiness in his throat when he tried to call him by his last name, and sometimes even when he tried to _think_ of him by it. And although Draco knew the bloody collar was at fault, it was easier to give in than to go on doing something that only hurt himself.  
  
Harry slept with his mouth slightly open in the large bed. They’d been able to buy a much nicer house than Draco had thought they’d be able to, when they came back in time. It seemed that the goblins cared about their surnames and their blood, not who they were or whether they were technically supposed to be nineteen instead of eleven. They had silken sheets, and mahogany and ebony furniture, and enough space that they didn’t get on each other’s nerves during the day.  
  
They also had something else.  
  
Draco reached out and trailed his fingers down Harry’s face with exquisite slowness, from the curve of his ear to the top of his cheekbone, from the top of his cheekbone to the side of his eye, from the side of his eye to the shaggy stubble that Harry never spent enough time trimming. By that point, Harry’s eyes were awake and burning a question.   
  
“I think you’ve slept long enough,” Draco murmured, and eased towards him. Harry’s legs fell open, and so did his lips. Draco bent down and kissed him hard enough to steal his air and any protests he might make.  
  
As Draco’s hand slid under Harry’s clothes, he smiled. The collar had wrought changes. If Harry gave him a deliberate order in public, or even during the day, Draco had to obey it. But at night, and in the bed…  
  
Draco was in charge. And if he had ideas he needed to persuade Harry of, the collar gave him the strength and the courage to do that.  
  
It was probably the closest he would ever come to being a Gryffindor.  
  
And he knew it wasn’t the kind of happy life his mother had envisioned sending him into when she’d given Harry the collar and begged him to hide Draco in the far reaches of time. But it was the one he’d arrived at.  
  
As Harry kissed his neck, the way Draco knew, and eased further down his body, Draco closed his eyes and drank in the moonlight and his own quickening pleasure.  
  
*  
  
“We’ll probably go to hell for doing this.”  
  
“I don’t know why,” Harry said, as they stood at Platform 9 ¾, waiting for the Hogwarts Express to pull up. They both wore glamours, of course, one for Harry to change the shape of his face, the state of his hair, and the scar, and two for Draco, one to hide his distinctive hair color and one to conceal the collar. “We know what your mum said. You’re the only one who disappeared from this time. We can’t do anything about that. We _can_ spare the younger me from six more summers of the Dursleys, though.”  
  
Draco gave him an opaque glance. _He’s always doing that,_ Harry thought. He would explain and argue and discuss, and Draco would either make a cryptic remark or just say nothing.   
  
Harry thought it was probably related to the collar. It hadn’t taken them long to discover the limits of his “control.” He could order Draco to do things, yes, but it worked best if he gave the orders thoughtlessly, like “Come here” and “Take that cup to the sink, would you?” If he yelled at Draco in anger, the collar hummed and spat and fussed like a frightened cat, and Harry woke up in the night to a sensation of wild beasts’ eyes watching him.  
  
He preferred to avoid that.  
  
“You didn’t argue _that_ much,” Harry added now, as he heard the shrill whistle of the Express pulling in. “You seemed to think it was perfectly all right except for one or two questions last night.” They already had an extra bedroom for young Harry, and toys for him, and a conjured bed. Harry didn’t remember the right size of clothes, so he would take him to the shops as soon as he could.  
  
“You’re the one who’s in charge of explaining to him where we came from,” Draco said. “And telling him why we weren’t here before. And explaining about _this_.”  
  
Harry knew he would be touching the collar, although Harry didn’t look at him to see that. His eyes were on the thin, messy-haired figure with a trunk bouncing behind him and a white owl in a cage. The sight of Hedwig made him ache almost more than seeing the way young Harry joked with Ron and Hermione.  
  
 _I left them, to come here._ The fact that he couldn’t have done otherwise ate at Harry, sometimes. Narcissa had invoked a life-debt, and he couldn’t bring anyone with him, and even if Ron and Hermione had been able to come, it would have meant bringing the rest of the Weasleys and Hermione’s parents—at the very _least_ —along with them. And then there was Fleur’s family, and Angelina, and…  
  
It would have meant too much disruption to the timeline. And Harry couldn’t let Draco simply die, the way Narcissa had been able to prove he would if he stayed in their original time.   
  
Harry would remember his farewells with his friends for the rest of his life, at least. There was that.  
  
He released most of the glamour on his face with a little flicker of his wand just as young Harry looked in their direction. He didn’t dare reveal the scar on his forehead, but he thought Harry would trust him more if he could see the Potter face and Lily’s eyes.  
  
Young Harry looked at him, attracted by the wand movement, and then gaped. Harry made his way slowly forwards, reassured when he heard Draco moving behind him. He was heartened, too, to see the way little Hermione and Ron bunched up around their friend, and glared at him in suspicion.  
  
 _No matter what, even if he wants to go back to the Dursleys, at least he has people who love him,_ Harry thought, and kept his voice low and soothing as he said, “Harry Potter? I’m Henry Potter. I’m very happy to meet you.”  
  
*  
  
“I want to leave England.”  
  
Draco didn’t think it that outlandish a request, but apparently it was one Potter wasn’t expecting. He leaned back in his chair and considered Draco with a piece of bacon hanging out of his mouth. Draco twitched with uncontrollable desire to reach across the table and push it back in.  
  
Then he found himself actually _doing_ that. Apparently his magic and the collar interacted in ways that he still hadn’t learned how to control, even when he thought he had.  
  
“Why?” Potter finally asked, when he’d swallowed and leaned away from Draco’s fingers.   
  
He’d spent a lot of time looking at Draco’s hands and face since they arrived here. Draco thought he knew why, but he was still going to make Potter bloody _work_ for it, not just assume he could have Draco since Draco wore the collar and Potter “commanded” him. They’d learned the limits of that command right bloody quick.  
  
Draco sat down again and said, “My family is looking for me. And someone saw us in Diagon Alley the other day. My mother’s already owled me asking me if I’m a Malfoy relative, or if I might know what’s happened to her missing son.”  
  
Draco felt his muscles ache numbly as he stared at the letter on the table. Only knowing that his mother in the future willingly made the sacrifice so Draco would be free had let him resist her pleading so far. Draco, in this time, disappeared, the eleven-year-old boy he was dissolving as the eighteen-year-old one stepped back in time.  
  
Draco didn’t know why he’d vanished when there was apparently still a copy of Potter somewhere out there. But his mother had mentioned it had something to do with the collar, and at least he was _prepared_.  
  
“Shit.” Potter tugged hard at his hair. “You realize it’s going to be a lot harder to survive outside England without Galleons and properties?”  
  
“You _realize_ that it would be dangerous to use the Potter properties anyway, in case Dumbledore gets suspicious and investigates?” Draco asked dryly. “Or even someone else. I don’t know if Black could find his way in, but it’s not impossible, given how much your father trusted him.”  
  
Potter shut his eyes. “Sirius. Shit. I haven’t thought enough about him, either.”  
  
Draco shrugged, unimpressed, and looked around the tiny flat they’d rented off Diagon Alley. It took them almost all their converted Muggle money, the ceiling leaked, the furniture wobbled, and Draco wanted to get _away_. “You had some plan to free him and make sure he could look after your younger self, you said. Well, I would go ahead and set that in motion. Then he’s taken care of, _and_ we can leave.”  
  
Potter sat there and chewed his lip. Then he nodded. “I wanted to go to the Ministry, investigate, get them to look into the situation and be there when they freed Sirius…”  
  
“That was always a stupid—”  
  
“Shut _up_ , Malfoy.”  
  
Draco felt his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, and grimaced. There was the inconvenience of the collar again.  
  
“But I’ll have to get Scabbers away from the Weasleys and change him back and send him to the Ministry with an explanation instead, I suppose,” Potter went on, sounding more and more unhappy. “I hope my writing is different enough from Harry’s to make it seem he didn’t write it.”  
  
“As if anyone would suspect a sheltered eleven-year-old of being able to track down an Animagus and capture him,” Draco said impatiently. He could see why Potter was preoccupied with his eleven-year-old self—they’d arrived during the summer after the boy’s first year at Hogwarts—but he didn’t want to raise a child, and he didn’t want to stay in England. “Go ahead and do it.”  
  
Potter nodded and stood up to go to the fireplace they’d illegally hooked to the Floo, but he gave Draco a sharpish look over his shoulder as he did. “I thought you were going to stay quiet longer than that.”  
  
Draco didn’t even bother to make his smile less smug. “Don’t blame me if the collar interprets your orders the wrong way, Potter.”  
  
The mention of the collar and the slave bond was one sure way to make Potter shut up. He was so _uncomfortable_ with his own power. It tired Draco. He wouldn’t rather have a cruel master, but he would rather have one who didn’t give him orders and then pause and stutter, only to give orders later anyway.  
  
 _If I want to be more comfortable, though,_ Draco thought, linking his hands together behind his head as he studied Potter’s back, _I’ll have to make the atmosphere more comfortable with him, too. Make him more tempted to give requests instead of orders. And get him out of England so he isn’t only thinking about people from the past—future—whatever._  
  
No order Potter gave him could prevent the operation of his mind. Draco was already working on how to make sure that Potter would only give him orders for their mutual benefit and enjoyment.  
  
*  
  
The paths of time spin and spiral around each other. The cursed nature of the alicorn places humans in the position of the unicorn—but humans were not meant to live in that time-free way. They feel that something is not quite right. They see glimpses of other paths out of the corner of their eyes. Or they dream of them. Or they wake one morning, perhaps, in one place, and the next in another.   
  
On the other hand, as the curse settles, as the paths grow older, the humans walking them become more and more like different sets of people in different universes, rather than one set split in two.  
  
Or in thirds, as the case may be.  
  
*  
  
“I don’t really understand what you’re doing to me.”  
  
Draco smiled at Harry and slid a hand through his hair. Harry caught his breath, closing his eyes. He had thought his confession would change something—although now that he thought about it, why would it? They were safe. They were secure.  
  
The goblins had been willing to sell them recipes for potions that would permanently change the way they looked, so Harry didn’t have to worry about being “mistaken” for a Potter or Draco found out for a Malfoy. They had simple lives. Draco worked for an apothecary in Knockturn Alley. Harry had taken up a variety of odd jobs creating pranks for Zonko’s. He felt a _little_ betrayal for using some of Fred and George’s ideas from the future to live now, but he also knew they were extremely clever at coming up with new pranks.  
  
Hell, they might even work harder than before once they realized they supposedly had competition in Zonko’s.  
  
Harry had wanted to do something about his younger self, but Draco had convinced him to leave it alone. They didn’t know what would happen if they changed the past any more than they already had with the younger Draco’s disappearance, Draco argued. And they didn’t want to draw Dumbledore’s attention. And how would they ever convince an eleven-year-old to keep quiet about the truth?  
  
Harry had hesitated, but in the end, Draco had convinced him.  
  
Draco was really _good_ at being convincing.  
  
“Yes, you know exactly what I’m doing,” Draco said into his ear. Harry shuddered and closed his eyes, letting his head sag back against the chair. Draco’s hand slid slowly along his neck, and then down along his nape, scraping with the ring he had bought not long after they moved into this flat. Harry had no idea what Draco wanted with a plain silver ring that had a black stone on it, but obviously it was _something_.  
  
Now and then, Harry thought it was for this: seducing him out of his mind.  
  
“I’m making you into a good little pet,” Draco whispered into his ear. “Someone who has no _thoughts_ of ordering me around. Because I don’t like that, and you wouldn’t like me when I don’t like something.”  
  
Harry had to admit that _that_ , at least, was true, from some of the things Draco had said, or done. Harry never wanted to encounter those disappointed, turned-away eyes again.  
  
And in truth, Draco was the only one he had to trust and depend on. Going to Dumbledore to explain things would only end up with Harry being used. He was certain of that. Draco made him more certain. Young Harry’s friends were _his_ friends, and Harry had no claim on any of the adults like Molly or Arthur. Going to Sirius once he was free might be an option, but right now, it would mean changing the past, as would approaching Lupin.  
  
It was easier, safer, simpler, to slide into the soft seduction that Draco opened up beneath him.  
  
“Want to go to bed?” Draco asked into his ear, fingers playing with the collar of Harry’s robe as if he was going to take it in a minute and choke him with it.  
  
Harry surrendered. His head dropped, his hand reached up and brushed against the ivory smoothness of the alicorn collar for an instant, and he whispered, “ _Yes_.”  
  
Draco chuckled, and took him there.  
  
*  
  
“I don’t…understand.”  
  
Young Harry’s voice was soft and strained. Draco sighed and shrugged. He was worn out with trying to explain this in a way that a child could understand.  
  
The façade of “Henry Potter” and “Draconis Malfoy” hadn’t lasted long. Young Harry might not know much about his family, but he was absolutely certain there were no surviving bastard siblings of James Potter—less because he really knew, Draco thought, than because he couldn’t comprehend why “Henry” wouldn’t have come for him before.  
  
He’d squinted at Draco and then shook his head and proclaimed, “You look too much like him. Malfoy, I mean. You’re just him grown-up, aren’t you?” For a moment, he looked disturbed. “Wherever he went. Did you get into a Time Potion or something?”  
  
And then, one morning when Harry—the adult one—had been careless and yawning and in the bathroom when his younger self came in, the young one had seen his scar.  
  
“There’s not much to understand,” Draco said. “My mother wanted to save me. You haven’t met my mother yet, but you will, and she can move mountains.” He touched the alicorn collar. It was the one thing young Harry had eyed all the time but not asked questions about. “This sent us back in time. It’s made from unicorn horn. It’s incredibly powerful.”  
  
Young Harry shivered, and Draco paused, remembering for the first time that this was the year the boy had seen the Dark Lord drinking unicorn blood in the Forest. He grimaced, wanting to say something comforting, but then the moment passed and young Harry glared another demand for answers.  
  
“Why did you decide to adopt _me_ , though? If you weren’t supposed to change anything about time?”  
  
Draco grimaced at him again. They were in the large sitting room Harry had insisted on decorating in blue and red and gold, as if he expected his younger self to be some strange Ravenclaw-Gryffindor hybrid. Harry was at Auror training, thank Merlin, where his pretense of “Henry Potter” was accepted without much question.  
  
“Because Harry wanted to save you from growing up the way he did.”  
  
“Maybe you should call him Henry, after all.” The youngster frowned and folded his arms so tightly his shirt creased. “It’s too confusing to have two of us.” He went on while Draco was still trying to decide how to respond to that. “And what do you _mean_ , growing up the way he did? I already grew up with the Dursleys. He can’t do anything to change that.”  
  
Draco gave a short nod. “I think so, too.”  
  
“You don’t want me here,” young Harry said, giving Draco one of those looks he remembered so well, the ones that used to start battles in Potions on a regular basis.  
  
“I didn’t,” Draco said. “Harry was the one who made that decision.”  
  
“Harry who’s _me_.” The younger Harry pulled his glasses off and spent a moment rubbing the scar on his forehead, which was redder than the one Draco was used to staring at. “God, this is weird.”  
  
“Yes.” Draco leaned back slowly on the couch and shut his eyes. He was tired of explaining. He thought the child _understood_. The problem was getting him to accept it. “And you realize you can’t tell anyone about this?”  
  
“Oh, I’m used to keeping secrets. Adults have a tendency not to believe me, anyway.”  
  
Draco snapped his eyes open again, and studied the kid. He sat with his face turned slightly away from Draco, staring out the window. There was a tension to his jaw that Draco hadn’t noticed before.  
  
 _He thinks he’s come from one bad situation into another. He thinks that he can live with magical people now, but we’re going to treat him like the Muggles did_.  
  
Draco shook his head. He couldn’t stand for the kid to think that, and he reached out before he thought about it and shook young Harry’s shoulder. The boy jumped and turned to look at him again.  
  
“We’re not going to do that to you,” he said quietly. “I’ll believe whatever you tell me, and so will Harry.”  
  
For a moment, the boy only stared at him. Then he whispered, “Why? I mean, not He—Henry, but you. You never believed me when I said anything at school.”  
  
“I’m not that boy, even if he disappeared so I could come here.” Draco shrugged a little and gave Harry a light smile. “I’ve grown up. I know what it’s like to be in a situation where people are laughing at you, and others are just waiting for you to fail.” He touched the collar around his neck when little Harry glared like he didn’t believe him. “In case you ever forget, I’m wearing this collar because I failed. I became a Death Eater—”   
  
“One of Voldemort’s followers. You said.”  
  
Draco would never get used to how someone so _small_ and with such bright green eyes said “Voldemort” so fearlessly. “And then I was on the losing side of the war,” he said through a choked throat. “I was in so much danger that my mother called on Harry to take me away, and he did.”  
  
“Why did he want to come with you, though? How could he bear to leave Ron and Hermione?”  
  
Draco shook his head again. “That’s something you’ll have to ask him. My mother told me I was going to safety, and I was so terrified that I agreed before I asked about the consequences. She spoke to him in private.”  
  
There was a long moment when Draco thought that he would have to backtrack, or at least explain some of the concepts involved over again. Harry looked at him with those watching, judging eyes, and there was no way to escape them. Draco found himself holding still, wanting to pass the test anyway, even though he knew how small the chances were that he could.  
  
Then Harry nodded and said, “I think you might be okay. What’s for dinner?” and Draco smiled, knowing that he had.  
  
*  
  
“ _Will_ you pay attention to what’s in front of us?”  
  
Harry shook his head a little and focused on the painting in front of him. They were touring a wizarding museum in Paris, which Malfoy insisted was much better than the Muggle ones, and _properly_ famous to anyone with a _proper_ upbringing. Harry only knew that so far most of the paintings were either boring landscapes or mixes of bright, abstract colors that made him nauseous.  
  
This one was at least a landscape instead of colors, but it was a bland one. A few trees on the bank of a lake, or maybe an ocean; Harry didn’t know how you told the difference in a painting. There was blue water and curling waves, and that was all he knew.  
  
“It’s pretty,” he said, and Malfoy gave him the expected roll of eyes and the disgusted look.  
  
“ _Pretty_ , he says about the most famous painting since Merlin’s death,” he muttered, then flung out a hand dramatically. Harry noticed he still looked at the little plaque on the wall beside the painting, though, so it wasn’t like he knew all this information off the top of his head. “This is the work of Peter Styer.” He paused.  
  
Harry instinctively bristled at the name “Peter,” but only said, “So?”  
  
Malfoy closed his eyes in a slow blink that was the most exasperated gesture Harry had ever seen him make. Then he muttered and shook his head and spoke in a gentle voice that Harry suspected he’d spent time practicing. “He was a Seer who could look back in time and paint what he saw. This was what he saw at the moment of Merlin’s death.” Malfoy again stabbed a finger at the painting. “This is what was happening then.”  
  
Harry stared some more, but no matter how much he looked at the picture, he didn’t see a wizard, or a tombstone, or a deathbed, or even a boat. Wasn’t there a legend how Merlin had been carried somewhere on a boat and he would stay there until he was ready to wake up because England needed him again?  
  
 _No, wait, that was King Arthur,_ Harry thought, and shrugged. “So?” he asked again.  
  
Malfoy stalked off. Harry followed him with a faint smile.  
  
The smile faded as he considered what he’d left behind him in England. Sirius was free now, and in charge of Harry. Remus had even come back to live with them, once Sirius’s letter had found him, and he’d seen the newspaper articles about the trial. His younger self was as safe as he could be, growing up with people who cared for him.  
  
But Harry couldn’t help worrying. His younger self would be in Hogwarts now and hearing the basilisk slithering through the walls. Harry had warned him about the diary and the Heir of Slytherin, but Sirius had written to say that they hadn’t been able to stop Lucius Malfoy from slipping it to Ginny, and no one had seen it since, even after Ron helped young Harry search through all of Ginny’s books. So maybe someone else had it now.  
  
He might still go through what Harry had to. He would still have to fight Voldemort. Harry couldn’t. He wasn’t a Horcrux and he didn’t have the blood protection from his mother anymore. If—  
  
“They have a life, and _you_ have a life, too.”  
  
Harry started. He’d thought Malfoy had left the museum altogether, but instead, he’d simply stopped in front of him and stood with folded arms, studying Harry while a muscle ticked in his jaw.  
  
“If they knew everything about what was really going on,” Malfoy went on, barely raising his voice, “instead of thinking you were just a long-lost Potter relative, then they would urge you to go and live your life. Lupin and Black would say they could handle it. And you survived it once before.”  
  
“Things are different now. What if Sirius and Remus are wrong? And what if—”  
  
Malfoy put out a firm hand. Harry started as Malfoy touched his shoulder. They had to sleep beside each other in the bed due to the restrictions imposed by the slave bond and the damn collar, but they rarely touched each other during the day. That Malfoy would do something now…  
  
“It’s partially for my own sake,” Malfoy admitted as he caught Harry’s wondering gaze. “I don’t want to spend the rest of what should be my holiday or my _life_ having no companionship because you’re back in England in your mind.”  
  
“You could make friends,” Harry muttered, but he knew as well as Malfoy how hard that would be. The collar around his neck meant he couldn’t spend too much time apart from Harry. They couldn’t just abandon each other, either, or go through the day carefully not speaking and looking in opposite directions. They’d tried that for about a week. It had been lonelier than summer at the Dursleys’, with Harry not even having the reassurance that his Hogwarts and his friends existed somewhere and he could go back to them.  
  
“I _need_ you to be my friend,” Malfoy muttered, and then grimaced. “Believe me, you aren’t my first choice, either.”  
  
Harry slowly breathed out. He tried, for the first time, to think of the positives of what he had instead of only the negatives. Freedom to travel the world. Someone who did know everything that had happened, instead of him having come back in time alone. No war, no Voldemort. The knowledge that a lot of hardships were behind him.  
  
The knowledge that Sirius and Dumbledore and Remus were all alive here, and forewarned, so things were less likely to go wrong than they had.  
  
 _I’ve done as much as I can. Malfoy is right. I can’t spend the rest of my life grieving and wondering and dashing back to England to help. If nothing else, it’s only six more years until this Harry is out of Hogwarts. What do I do then? I’ll only be twenty-five._  
  
“Okay,” Harry said. “You’re right.”  
  
Malfoy stumbled, even though he still had a hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry laughed aloud, and reached out to punch Malfoy in _his_ shoulder.  
  
“I can’t go on thinking about the past,” Harry went on, “Or the future that’s going to happen to someone other than me. I have to decide whether to enjoy this or forget all about it and go back to England and hover over my younger self, which is probably what would happen.” He sighed out a deep breath and added, “I want to change things that haven’t happened yet. I want things to be different. Please call me Harry.”  
  
Malfoy eyed him in dazed wonder. Harry nodded to him and smiled until his face hurt, and finally Malfoy said, as though the word pained him, “Harry.”  
  
“There you are. And you’re Draco.” Harry looked around and realized that, for the first time, they stood in a room that contained statues as well as paintings. Some of the statues were of centaurs and dragons instead of wizards, and he felt a stirring of interest. “Tell me what they’re about?” he added, gesturing to one of the statues.  
  
With many darkling looks over his shoulder at him, as if he assumed Harry would tell him he’d been joking any second, Draco led him over to the statue of the nearest centaur and said, “He was Venin. Walked into a camp of Merlin’s Shields fifteen centuries ago and told them they were about to be overrun by an army of Muggles…”  
  
Harry listened, and learned.  
  
*  
  
Defining moments can be so small, and at least for humans, not all are pre-defined, set in place like the spirals on a unicorn’s horn. Humans have, or at least they tell themselves they have, freedom to make choices, to choose what they want, to live the lives they decide on.  
  
And to a certain extent, that is true. But still, paths are constrained. They cannot become wizards if they aren’t born with magic. They can’t practice professions they never hear about, or that only come into being after they’re dead. They have to choose what’s more important to them, complete freedom or compromising to keep people they care for, and most choose the compromises.  
  
Single moments can alter a unicorn’s path.  
  
Or a human’s.  
  
*  
  
Draco groaned as he slid into Harry. He had enjoyed this pleasure for months now, and still it never staled, never made him feel as if he was going to grow bored.  
  
Their lives had assumed a measured, rational pace here. They had their separate jobs. They earned enough money to live in a bigger flat. They still sometimes went wrapped in glamours when they were with people who might notice the collar, but it was growing easier.  
  
Draco woke up now in the morning and touched a finger to the alicorn collar to reassure himself it was still there, rather than cursing the fact that it was. He felt the soft prod to his thoughts when he tried to resist an order Harry gave him during the day. He obeyed because it amused him to do so.  
  
 _His_ thrusts into Harry’s arse were much harder than any proddings from the collar ever could be.  
  
Harry lay beneath him, arms stretched out so that his hands dangled off the edge of the bed, and groaned. His legs were spread the same way, and he shuddered as Draco drove and drove into him. Draco knew that he was probably hurting Harry more than a little.  
  
Did that matter? Of course not. What mattered was that Harry was _his_ , and so far his that he now looked at Draco for orders, that he was now the one to beg for kisses and for Draco to touch his hair, that he shied away from the people who would have tried to become his friends.  
  
In all the world, Draco only had Harry and Harry only had Draco. And their joy was intense, and their _pleasure_ —  
  
Draco rode Harry to the end, in a blaze of strength that made his mind churn. He slumped down beside him and looked at Harry’s hand. Yes, frantically pumping away at himself, as usual.  
  
“Finish,” Draco said, cracking the word in half with a yawn.  
  
It didn’t matter. Harry always finished the instant Draco commanded him to.  
  
Draco smiled and curled up around Harry, closing his eyes. His breathing was slowing now, his hair spilling around the collar and into Harry’s face.  
  
Harry lay in the wet spot. Draco didn’t have to tell him to. He did it just because he wanted to, and he would gloat over his “sacrifice” in the morning and go to shower with a brilliant smile on his face.  
  
 _My mother knew what she was doing, sending us back in time,_ Draco thought lazily, and he dropped his head to the pillow and inhaled their mingled scents. _And in giving me the collar. I thought she was making me a slave._  
  
 _But she was granting me the freedom of power._  
  
*  
  
Harry—hell, he almost thought of himself as “Henry” now—stood in the window and watched Draco and Harry playing Quidditch in the back garden.  
  
They lived in Hogsmeade, and so they _could_ have a back garden and brooms and enough room to play Quidditch. Henry watched as his younger self dodged a Bludger and laughed. He hadn’t been hunted by a Bludger this year; Henry had managed to reassure Dobby that he and Draco would protect Harry, and the little elf had just watched from a distance instead of trying to interfere.  
  
And the minute Harry had heard the basilisk hissing in the walls, he’d owled them—well, owled Draco, really. Draco had explained matters to Dumbledore, and together they’d taken the diary from Ginny before she injured herself or someone else with it. Dumbledore went down into the Chamber of Secrets, and how he killed the basilisk and destroyed the Horcrux, Henry didn’t know.  
  
The only thing that _really_ mattered to him was that Harry hadn’t had to do it.  
  
Harry laughed again as he caught the Quaffle Draco was tossing around to distract him from the Snitch, and Henry closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the cool glass.  
  
There was something else they had to think about, something Draco had mentioned the other day, utterly startling Henry when he did.  
  
Little Harry was still a Horcrux. It was the one thing they’d kept from him, and when they did, Henry had discovered a new sympathy for Dumbledore. How _did_ you tell a child that they were destined to at least temporarily die to get a soul-shard out of their head? That the soul-shard was from the man who had murdered their parents?  
  
Henry couldn’t come up with a way to break it gracefully, and Draco didn’t think they should tell Harry at all. So Harry didn’t know.  
  
 _Draco thinks he’s going to die. Draco thinks we should train him. Draco doesn’t trust Dumbledore to hunt out other methods of destroying the Horcruxes._  
  
Henry watched the innocent gleam in their _son’s_ eyes, and decided that he would have to make the decision soon. He didn’t want to tarnish Harry’s innocence.  
  
But he would rather see those eyes dimmed and dulled with pain than dimmed and dulled forever.  
  
*  
  
“ _Shit_.”  
  
Draco put his head in his hands and tried to calm his breathing. Harry had already sat up beside him, blinking slowly.   
  
He nodded when he caught Draco eye and Summoned a glass, then conjured water. Draco pressed the glass to his forehead before he sipped from it.  
  
Harry remained sitting up, his hands resting on the crisp sheets of the bed in the Muggle hotel they’d chosen to stay in. Draco hadn’t wanted to, not at first, but after a full day of exploring the sights in the Muggle part of Rome, they’d both been too tired to Apparate. And Harry didn’t look tired now.  
  
He was waiting.  
  
Draco bit back an impatient curse and asked, “I suppose it wouldn’t do any good if I said I didn’t want to talk about my nightmares?”  
  
“I would accept that decision,” Harry said. “That’s why I’m not asking you. But I wouldn’t go back to sleep.”  
  
Draco grimaced and rolled over. He would suffer if Harry didn’t go back to sleep. Not from the collar. It never punished him at night, and Harry had learned better than to order him around unless his life was in danger.  
  
But since they had started calling each other by their first names, Draco had learned that he _hated_ lying there while he listened to Harry’s soft, shallow breathing. He was tense if Harry was tense. He slept best when Harry slept.  
  
It was an effective threat without invoking the slave bond or the collar at all. And for that, Draco had to respect Harry as much more cunning than he’d initially thought him.  
  
He turned and said reluctantly, “I dreamt that our escape failed. I found myself in the Manor with a dozen Aurors coming to escort me to Azkaban, and you—you stood back and shook your head when my mother appealed to you. And then they broke my arm, and you laughed.”  
  
Harry listened without saying he would never do anything like that. He just nodded and then reached out and put an arm around Draco.  
  
“I had nightmares about Voldemort constantly when we still shared a link. One night I dreamed that a Muggle caretaker was going into a house to investigate, because he thought he’d heard people there. He found them. This disgusting baby-like creature sitting in a chair, and a sniveling man that the baby called Wormtail…”  
  
Draco listened in silence, tracing his fingers in a slow, dance-like pattern over Harry’s arm. He noticed something he didn’t think Harry had meant him to: the absent shiver Harry gave him when Draco touched him like that.  
  
Draco smiled. Now that he had managed to convince Harry to think about their living future instead of either version of the past or their buried future, he had more courage, despite the nightmares.  
  
Enough courage to explore what this meant tomorrow night, perhaps.

*

The paths spiral on, and begin to form a pattern. Not that the pattern would be visible to someone living in one of the paths—only someone who has the ability to stand outside them, and watch.  
  
No human possesses that ability. Even those who have a cursed artifact made of alicorn cannot do it, because they are bound within the artifact’s path. A unicorn, with a horn of its own, can watch the patterns woven by another horn, and glide among them, or change them, or choose one and follow it to its end.  
  
A unicorn might choose to do that, even for a path that led to death.  
  
In many ways, unicorns have more common sense than humans.  
  
*  
  
Harry looked out the window at the sun, curious. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spent more than an hour in it. He was outside sometimes at Zonko’s, but he could do better work sitting at a desk and scribbling ideas on parchment. He even ate inside, because Draco didn’t want him getting chilled when it was cold or sunburned when it was hot or wet when it rained.  
  
Harry leaned his elbows on the windowsill and thought. He had a lot of memories that were connected to the sunlight. He could remember hovering in it during games of Quidditch, and laughing when he caught the Snitch, and discussing the future with Ron and Hermione, or homework, as they sat beside the lake at Hogwarts.  
  
But he had a lot of memories of night, too. Flying on the thestrals. The first time he had approached Hogwarts, in the boats, fighting off his awe. Lying with Draco in their bed at night, and how much he had _luxuriated_ in that lying.  
  
He shivered.  
  
“All right, love?”  
  
Draco called him that most of the time now, instead of his name. That more than satisfied Harry. He wasn’t who he had been, the man who had lived in the future. How could that man exist without the context of his future?   
  
And he wasn’t the boy growing up in this time. The past belonged to that Harry, now, and memories weren’t the same thing as living through the experience of confronting your mad godfather, or killing a basilisk with a sword.  
  
“Yes, I’m fine,” Harry replied, leaning back and feeling the comfortable arm encircle his waist, the way he had known it would. “Only thinking of the past, and how strange it seems to me now that I’m here with you.”  
  
He felt the weight of the collar around Draco’s neck brush his own collarbone for a moment before Draco nipped his ear and ordered, “I don’t want you to think about that again.”  
  
“But, Draco—”  
  
Harry was going to protest, say that there might be something important there, something that could help them, but Draco nipped his chin and shut him up. Then he slid his hand around the back of Harry’s neck, and Harry stopped thinking completely.  
  
“Think about other things,” Draco whispered, and began to drag him backwards, his heels leaving grooves in the carpet. “Think about me, and bed, and the way you want to share those things with _no one_.”  
  
Harry closed his eyes, and soft, sweet darkness slid behind his eyelids. He moaned, quietly, but Draco heard it. Harry could never be quiet enough to hide anything from Draco.   
  
“Yes,” Draco said, and that _yes_ guided Harry’s days in the way Draco’s _no_ once had. Harry let the sunlight go.  
  
*  
  
“You’re a Horcrux.”  
  
Draco was watching, and he saw how pain clawed its way across Harry’s face, in the instant before he ducked his head. He was thirteen now, almost fourteen, fresh from a peaceful year at Hogwarts, and Draco hated to watch that façade of happiness destroyed with a single word from Draco, like a pane of glass shattering at the touch of a hammer.  
  
But it only ever _had_ been a façade. Harry was destined to die.  
  
Henry had thought they should tell him. Draco had argued against that at first. Harry didn’t need to understand his role to play it. They had years to train him, and Draco had started sneaking that training in months since: teaching Harry actual combat reflexes in their “mock” duels, playing constant Quidditch with him to work up his speed and stamina, and flinging tough questions at him in owls and talks during dinner to exercise his mind.  
  
Henry had tried to say they needn’t train Harry if he only needed to stand in front of Voldemort’s wand and die. But Draco had said they should, and then he had come to understand his own motives better.  
  
They needed to tell Harry so he _could_ die. Fighting against the Dark Lord, he might escape and get lucky, as Henry had in their original universe. Alternatively, he might die in a Death Eater attack before the right moment. So train him just enough, and then reveal the truth. He would go to his death.  
  
 _The way he has to,_ Draco thought, feeling and accepting his own pain. _I had to do harder things than this. I had to leave behind my own world. I’ll wear a slave collar for the rest of my life. If I can do that, Harry can do this._  
  
Harry lifted his head. His eyes were tearless, which Draco had to admit surprised him. “I want to know one thing.”  
  
“How it happened?” Draco shook his head. “Even after years of research, we still aren’t sure why that night—”  
  
“No. I want to know if you and Henry are having sex.”  
  
Draco opened his mouth. He closed it. He felt his face burn, and Harry laughed a little and dashed a hand across his face as if to get rid of the tears that weren’t there.  
  
“I knew it,” he said. “What I can’t figure out is why you never _told me_.”  
  
Draco closed his eyes. “It only happened a few months ago. And I didn’t know how you would feel. And your godfather once threatened to take you away from us if he ever saw a sign that we were unfit guardians. And Henry was afraid.”  
  
“ _Afraid?_ Why?”  
  
Draco opened his eyes. “Because he thinks you still remember the Draco Malfoy who was your enemy in first year, and Henry _is_ you. He wasn’t sure how you would feel about sleeping with Draco Malfoy.”  
  
Harry shook his head, and then he stood up abruptly and wandered over to the window. He looked so much like Henry, the way he stood when he watched a Quidditch match, the way he _moved_ , that Draco felt a sharp tingle run through his body. He had fenced off the thought that Henry and Harry were the same person, concentrating on the differences between them, or able to think of only one person when Harry was at school and Henry was the one in bed with him.  
  
But this made him remember the boy who had come to life in the half-giant’s arms and fought the Dark Lord to death.  
  
“I don’t really remember that boy,” Harry said quietly, turning around. “You can tell him that. He disappeared the day before I came home.” Draco knew he meant the flat where they’d lived at the time, that “home” was with Draco and Henry. Harry lowered his eyes. “And I want to know more about the Horcrux. And you.”  
  
“All right,” Draco said. “All right. I can do that.”  
  
As Harry lifted fierce eyes to his, Draco found himself trying to calculate how many days remained between now and the time that his adopted son would have to face the Dark Lord. How many times he would have to train him, and eat dinner with him, and play Quidditch with him, and look forward to receiving a letter from him.  
  
 _I don’t think I’ve shattered his innocence after all. But I might have shattered mine._  
  
*  
  
Harry opened his eyes and stared at the ceiling. When he turned his head, it was to see Draco soundly asleep beside him, one arm stretched out so that Harry could clearly see the bites _he’d_ left on it.  
  
He raised himself on his elbow and trailed his fingers over the bite marks, a little amused, a little incredulous.  
  
Draco had looked at him oddly yesterday, Harry had thought, when he should have been looking at the sights of Turkey and scolding Harry into paying more attention to wizarding history and culture. But Harry had been more distracted by the touches. The way Draco leaned on him, put an arm around his shoulder, laughed into his ear and then moved away as if it was all casual to him, not deliberate.  
  
Now Harry knew he _should_ have realized it was deliberate. That Draco would never do something like that without a purpose behind it.  
  
But they’d traveled together for two years now. He hadn’t thought Draco wished to change what they had. Why would he? Since the day they’d started calling each other by their first names, they were close friends, without a hint of something else.  
  
Harry’s eyes fell abruptly on the alicorn collar. He frowned and looked away, shaking his head a little.  
  
 _Master and slave. You are that, too._  
  
“Harry?”  
  
As it sometimes did, his distress, projected through the collar, had woken Draco up. Harry smiled at him and bent over to hug him. “Are you all right?”  
  
“All right, he says.” Draco rolled his eyes.  
  
Harry stiffened. “You aren’t?” He’d been so _overcome_ last night, all the emotions bursting out of him at once from behind a dam he hadn’t realized he’d built, that he might have hurt Draco without realizing it.  
  
Draco raised himself on hands and knees and slinked towards him. Harry found himself leaning away, but only until Draco draped his arms around Harry’s shoulders and gave him a tongue-melting kiss. Then he relaxed.  
  
“When my body is still tingling with the aftermath of my pleasure,” Draco whispered into his ear, the way he had yesterday, “then I would say I’m more than _all right_.”  
  
“Then let’s make it tingle some more,” Harry said, and rolled them over so they could get into the proper position.  
  
*  
  
As the paths spiral on, they become more and more entwined. What happens in one path can influence the others, as the spirals on a unicorn’s horn will rest beside the others, will make up a solid whole with them, instead of being completely separate.  
  
How this happens need not be understood. And especially not with humans who willingly accept the gift of a cursed alicorn taken from a unicorn’s body without permission.  
  
The curse isn’t always obvious.  
  
*  
  
“I’m worried about you, Harry. You know that?”  
  
Draco heard the words and halted at once outside the door of the small room in the back of Zonko’s where Harry worked most days. He reached up and stroked the collar, which tingled beneath his touch. It warned him, sometimes. It had warned him the other day when he’d almost stepped out in front of two wizards who had started to duel, and last year when a wind had almost blown his wand out of his hand.  
  
Now, he knew, the conversation was one that the person starting it—Helson, one of the workers at Zonko’s—wouldn’t have wanted him to overhear.  
  
“You are? Why?”  
  
“Well, you don’t seem to have friends. Other than Draconis,” Helson added, and Draco smiled. The man was wrong, of course. Draco wasn’t Harry’s _friend_. “You don’t go outside much. You dream half the day away. I mean, of course, I don’t mean—your daydreaming is where you come up with new ideas, so I wouldn’t want that to stop, but you need to do _something_ to have a life.”  
  
“I do, Helson,” said Harry, his voice gentle and distracted. “I have a life with Draco.”  
  
“A life _beyond_ him.”  
  
“Are you offering?”  
  
If Helson wasn’t a fool, he would have heard the way Harry’s voice went cold on the last words. So had Draco, for that matter, but he didn’t care. He was in the room in a moment, and his wand flickered once. Helson dropped to the floor with a groan, his hands pressed to his head.  
  
Draco smiled down at him. He had become expert at casting a combined Memory Charm and Concussion Curse. The pain and the injury would account for any blurry memories that _might_ show up when the victim started to awaken.  
  
Helson might not awaken, of course. There wasn’t anyone else in Zonko’s at the moment to help him. Harry normally stayed later than anyone else, and it was obvious that Helson had stayed late specifically to speak to him.  
  
“Draco?”  
  
Draco put his wand away and cornered Harry in a single hard motion. The parchment flew off his table, and he gasped and cried aloud as Draco forced his hands into a tight grip on Harry’s shoulders, and hooked his legs around Harry’s and yanked. In seconds Harry was standing in front of him with his own legs spread and vulnerable, his eyes wide and fixed on Draco’s face as if he was a revelation.  
  
“You’re mine only,” Draco whispered. “I don’t know what he was offering you, and I don’t care.” He leaned in and breathed on Harry’s throat, on the place where _he_ would wear an alicorn collar if he was the slave, and Harry writhed helplessly, eyes never closing, still locked on Draco’s. “Friendship, partnership, an escape from me? But you won’t take it.”  
  
“I would never have taken it,” Harry said simply. “I’m happy with you.”  
  
Happiness seemed a fragile word next to the burning inside Draco. He stepped back, unwinding his legs from Harry’s as he did so and beginning to kick off his boots. “Bend over the table,” he snapped.  
  
Harry’s eyes widened, but he turned and did so, bending to clasp the edge of the table and lifting his arse in the air. Draco eyed it wonderingly as he slid his own clothes off. He wondered for a moment if it was the collar that made him desire his “master” so much, or if he would have found Harry desirable without it, just because they were the only ones from the same time period.  
  
Then he was buried inside Harry, and the answer didn’t matter.  
  
Behind them, on the floor, Helson lay staring at the ceiling.  
  
*  
  
“Why do you keep telling me that I’ll probably survive when you _know_ I won’t?”  
  
Henry paused with his butterbeer halfway to his mouth. Harry stood in the doorway, his arms bent at such extreme angles that they looked like broken wings. And his eyes shone with a hard and deadly light that Henry didn’t think had been in his own eyes when _he_ was fifteen.  
  
At least, not until after Sirius was dead.  
  
“I don’t know what you mean by knowing you won’t,” Henry said, and clasped his hands behind his head, studying their adopted son. “I told you what happened to me. As far as I know, the same thing is going to happen to you. We know the Horcrux is in your scar. We already have the means to make you Master of the Deathly Hallows next year, since Headmaster Dumbledore has the Resurrection Stone and the Elder Wand, and he’ll let you conquer him for the Wand. And you have the Invisibility Cloak. So if being Master of the Deathly Hallows has anything to do with it, you’ll survive.”  
  
“But Draco told me the truth.” Harry stalked a little closer. “There’s only one Master of the Deathly Hallows. That’s you.”  
  
Henry felt his mouth fall open a little. He’d never considered that angle. Time travel hadn’t affected the holly-and-phoenix wand or the Invisibility Cloak; there were two of each now, one for him and one for Harry. He’d never thought that he might still be master of the Elder Wand here, or the Resurrection Stone.  
  
“I didn’t think of that,” he said, and ran his hand through his hair, still a nervous gesture with him even though his life and his name had changed. “Sorry.”  
  
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Harry whispered. “You didn’t bring the Elder Wand or the Resurrection Stone with you. There’s only one of them. They’ll have to choose a master, and that will be—you.”  
  
“You can’t know that,” Henry said. Sometimes he loved Draco and despised Draco’s theories, and this was one of those times. “It’s something we can test, something we can look at, but it’s not necessarily true.”  
  
“He showed me the theories,” Harry muttered, looking away. “It’s true.”  
  
“We won’t know for certain until we try it,” said Henry firmly. “For example, the Elder Wand seems to have worked well enough for Dumbledore all these years, which wouldn’t be true if it thought I was its master. So we’ll go to the school, and we’ll see what happens when I put a hand on it.”  
  
 _Probably nothing,_ he thought. _I hope nothing._ He didn’t know for sure if he’d survived Voldemort because of being the Master of Death—he thought it was more likely to be the Horcrux part of himself dying—but he wanted every advantage for Harry as he got ready to face his own Voldemort.  
  
“It’s true,” said Harry, and turned his back. “Did you know that Draco is the only one who really cares about me surviving? Even though he also thinks I _won’t_. Because he’s the one who’s put the time into training me.”  
  
“I wanted you to enjoy your childhood,” said Henry helplessly. He sounded like Dumbledore, and he winced in a way that shook his bones. Harry’s head came up like he was sniffing for danger. “I wanted you to play Quidditch without thinking about it as a way to dodge Death Eaters. And I wanted you to laugh with Ron and Hermione and not think about them dying in the war.”  
  
“ _They_ didn’t die, did they? Only me.”  
  
Henry winced. He sometimes thought that he and Draco adopting Harry wasn’t the best thing they could have done. Harry had grown more distant from his friends, obsessed with his secrets and the stories of the “future past” that Draco told him. He also acted sometimes like he thought Draco and Henry had made things worse by changing his own past, so that everything might not play out exactly the same this time.  
  
 _Or I made things worse._ It didn’t sound like Harry blamed Draco.  
  
Henry breathed through the temptation to get angry, and tried to see the positive side of that. At least Harry had someone he trusted, since he seemed like he wouldn’t listen to Henry.  
  
“You have greater things to worry about than that confrontation with Voldemort,” Henry said as gently as he could. “That’s almost two years away, still. If you want me to—”  
  
“I want you to make the test with the Elder Wand.” Harry still had his head turned to the side. “What are NEWT’s compared to that?”  
  
He left before Henry could say that he hadn’t been talking about NEWT’s. Henry sat down again and drank a gulp of butterbeer that had entirely lost its flavor.  
  
 _Maybe I made things worse. Should we have left him with the Dursleys? He would have grown up then, and suffered—and survived. This way we don’t know if he survives._  
  
The uncertainty gnawed a small hole in his heart, and curled up, and stayed there. Henry, staring in silence at the walls of the drawing room covered with posters full of zooming Quidditch players, thought it always would, even if the years passed and Harry was fine.  
  
But then he thought of something else, something that made him sit up and blow out a small blast of air.  
  
 _Even if we’d never adopted him and taken him out of the Dursleys’ house, the other Draco here would still have disappeared. That would have changed his life in a lot of ways. No Malfoy to compete against, no thinking Malfoy was the Heir of Slytherin, no Malfoy to rescue from the Fiendfyre or lie to the Snatchers at the Manor, and no Malfoy to use_ Sectumsempra _on in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom._  
  
Henry nodded slowly and opened his eyes.  
  
 _We’ll see about helping him survive. But just leaving things the way they were wouldn’t have done it._  
  
And he could better help Harry if he wasn’t eaten alive with guilt.  
  
*  
  
“Do you ever get tired of wandering around and just wish you could settle down somewhere?”  
  
Draco looked up and blinked at Harry. He’d been sitting under a huge tree, watching through half-open eyes as an orange-and-blue bird danced and called in front of him. There was little sunlight here, in the middle of the Amazon, crowded with towering growth, but enough to see the bird.  
  
Now the bird flew away, startled by Harry’s voice, and Draco sat up and asked, “Do you mean here in Brazil?”  
  
“I just mean—having a home. A home to go to. With people we know for more than a month at a time.”  
  
Harry was standing there with shifty eyes. Draco sighed and held out his hand. “Give it to me.”  
  
“Give you what?”  
  
Harry had never done innocent well, Draco thought, even when they were students at Hogwarts and he was trying to lie to a professor. “Whatever changed your mind. Only yesterday you were circling all those countries on the map that we hadn’t visited and telling me you wanted to see them before you die.”  
  
Harry paused once before he pulled out something wet and crumpled and handed it over. Draco had to cast a charm to dry the ink before he could read it. It was a _Daily Prophet_ , and it had a picture of Harry on the front.  
  
 _No, wait, the other Harry._ He looked shaken and had his head turned off to the side as though he didn’t want to have his picture taken. The headline underneath said that Black was in critical condition at St. Mungo’s.   
  
Draco skimmed the article. Apparently Death Eaters had attacked Hogsmeade when the other Harry was there with his friends, and Black had jumped in between him and a Cutting Curse. He would probably survive, but the article—by Skeeter, of course—talked on and on about how shaken “Mr. Potter” was and what kind of threat would come his way next, maybe one that adults couldn’t protect him from.  
  
“There’s something else,” Harry said, clearing his throat softly.  
  
Draco looked up. “What?”  
  
“If we went back to England, you could see your parents.”  
  
Draco shook his head at once. “I prefer to remember them the way I knew them,” he said. He reached his hand to touch the alicorn collar, something he almost forgot now despite the constriction it often put on his throat. “Not these versions who are probably still grieving the loss of their son.”  
  
“Draco—”  
  
“I’ve lived through things I can never tell them about,” Draco said, and turned and stood to face Harry. “And I’ve been _happy_ in the years since. What do you think they would say if I came back and told them I always knew the truth and didn’t tell them about it? Do you think they’ll welcome me? Or even believe that I’m a long-lost member of the family? No more than Black did with you being a bastard Potter. My father knows his genealogy. No matter what lie we came up with, he’d see through it.”  
  
“Draco…”  
  
“No, Harry,” said Draco. “I’m not going back to England because you’re scared for your younger self. You’ve barely thought about him for five years.”  
  
Harry bit his lip and closed his eyes. Draco stepped towards him and caught his shoulders, drawing him close, hearing Harry’s frantic heartbeat better than he did some of the distant birdsongs.  
  
“You’re your own person, with your own life,” Draco whispered. “We fought our war. We’re not going to go back there and fight it over again. You can’t protect him. And I can’t be the Draco Malfoy who disappeared. I _refuse_ to turn myself into a child for the benefit of people who wouldn’t appreciate the sacrifice anyway.”  
  
Harry was still motionless for a long moment. And then he raised his hand and stroked Draco’s hair.  
  
“Yes, you’re right,” he said. “I might wonder…but I made my decision, and I can’t go back and change things.”  
  
Draco had said what he had to say. He closed his eyes and held Harry instead, aware of the collar bumping against his neck when he turned his head.  
  
*  
  
The alicorn spirals on, and there is an end to the visible spirals, although never to all the spirals that are and can be. The human who holds a unicorn horn never knows the creature it was cut from, that proud, beautiful, almost indescribable vision of a galloper through time.  
  
All of these things are true.  
  
*  
  
Harry opened his eyes, and smiled a little as he saw the velvety blackness above him, pocked with stars.  
  
Draco had done what he said he would do. He’d built a large box like the kind that you would keep jewelry in. It had a velvet bottom, and a velvet top. It was made of expensive wood and banded with silver. It had a hole in the side of it so that Harry could breathe.  
  
This was where Harry spent his time when he wasn’t at Zonko’s and he wasn’t with Draco, which admittedly wasn’t much time. Mostly when Draco worked late. Draco had talked sometimes about having Harry leave his job at Zonko’s, but he hadn’t ordered him to yet.  
  
Harry could lie in the box, and look up at the small diamonds studding the velvet above him, and dream.  
  
He dreamed, always, of Draco coming back.  
  
*  
  
Draco shook his head a little and tossed a Firewhisky bottle across the table to Harry. “I never doubted.”  
  
“You didn’t?” Harry’s face was still pale and drawn with shock as he caught the bottle and stared at it. When he drank, it was slowly. Draco approved. His own spluttering first experiment with Firewhisky still curled the back of his tongue when he thought about it.  
  
“Not in the end.” Draco smiled at him, and deliberately didn’t think of the moment when he had watched Harry leap from Hagrid’s arms—Hagrid, because he had carried Henry in their other world. It had made his heart squeeze and soar. “I had to tell you I doubted, and prepare you for death, because otherwise you couldn’t have willingly walked into the Forest, could you? You would have doubted _yourself_ , and maybe tried to dodge the Killing Curse at the last minute. Because you had absolute faith in me, you passed the test.”  
  
 _Bollocks,_ said a voice in his head that sounded like Henry’s. _You’re even worse than Dumbledore, because you’re alive to lie about it._  
  
But as he watched the tentative hope open across Harry’s face, Draco didn’t care. He had given his son what he _needed_.  
  
“Yeah?” Harry drank a little Firewhisky, and then smiled broadly. “What did you think of Voldemort’s _face_ when he saw me come back to life?”  
  
“It was a sight,” Draco admitted, and sat through a recounting of events he had been there to see—twice—because he knew Harry needed it.  
  
When Harry had gone to bed, exhausted and exhilarated, Henry slipped into the kitchen and sat down across the table from Draco, looking at him.  
  
“What?” Draco added. “You know that was what he needed to hear.”  
  
“But not the truth.” Henry sipped from his own Firewhisky. He’d changed from the model of Harry that Draco always unconsciously compared him to, Draco thought. His scar was so faded almost no one noticed it, now. His hair was shaggy mostly with lack of effort in cutting it. His eyes were a deep and tired green. He looked older than twenty-six. “We were honest with him from the beginning.”  
  
“After trying to lie to him—”  
  
“And then we were honest.” Henry’s voice was sharp. He paused and stared at Draco. “Sometimes I think we became separate people as it concerns him,” he whispered. His voice lowered. “He’s more your son than mine. We barely talk now. What _are_ we?”  
  
Draco hesitated, his fingers brushing against the alicorn collar for a moment. Then he lifted his head and said, “We’re not master and slave.” And he downed another drink of Firewhisky.  
  
“I know that—”  
  
“And you’re not Harry Potter, and I’m not Malfoy, that git who tried to get you in trouble,” Draco said. He came around the table and stroked around Henry’s neck, the same place _he_ would wear an alicorn collar if another one existed. “Start over?”  
  
Henry, thank Merlin, was also smarter than the person he had once been. He smiled and nodded once, and Draco found himself relaxing before he thought about it.  
  
 _They can both matter to me. Even if it’s never in the same way._  
  
*  
  
“That’s not—that’s not _possible_.”  
  
Draco reached up and took the _Prophet_ from Harry’s hand. Then he kissed him on the mouth, on the cheeks, on the forehead, until Harry had to respond to him, not to the dazed vision that hovered in front of his eyes.  
  
“It’s possible,” Draco said quietly. “It happened.”  
  
“Not in the other world.”  
  
Draco shook his arm once, firmly. “That world doesn’t exist anymore. And in this one—this stopped being our war a long time ago.”  
  
“If we’d gone back to England last year…”  
  
“What difference could we have made?” Draco sighed. “If this version of Voldemort felt his Horcruxes being destroyed all along and decided to secure the last one of them before it could vanish, well, he was already different than the one we battled, and much harder to destroy. You couldn’t have done anything against him that anyone else didn’t try.”  
  
Harry closed his eyes and put his hands over them. He couldn’t stop seeing the headline.  
  
 _BOY-WHO-LIVED: IMMORTAL HOSTAGE._  
  
And the story had said Sirius and Remus were dead, half the Weasleys were dead, Hermione was in hiding with Ron trying to raise a resistance, Voldemort was steadily taking over Britain, and Harry…  
  
Harry was a known Horcrux. And with Voldemort, an “honored guest” in his palace. Forever.  
  
“It’ll become our war if it spreads outside Britain,” Harry whispered. “Voldemort will never be content with England.”  
  
“You don’t think so?” Draco shrugged against him, something Harry felt instead of saw since he still had his hands over his eyes. “He never had any plans to go outside the island that I know of. He recruited a few Death Eaters from other countries, but not many. He was only ever interested in hunting down wizards outside Britain if they were traitors. The other countries—we’ve seen—are full of the kinds of wizards who are going to give him a very _sharp_ resistance if he tries to act against them.”  
  
“I…”  
  
Harry swallowed. The problem with not feeling this level of guilt for years, he thought, was that it was difficult to cope with when it _did_ happen.  
  
“We’ll live,” Draco said. “We’ll survive. We’ll battle him if we have to. But we’ll probably be long dead before he becomes a problem—assuming he’s immortal and someone else doesn’t figure out a way to destroy him. How many Horcruxes can he make before he goes mad? Or what are the chances that they’re going to let your younger self live very long? They’ll kill him before they let him keep Voldemort immortal.”  
  
Harry swallowed slowly. Then he said dully, “Snape is still alive.”  
  
“Yes. And my father, who suspects that your younger self had something to do with _my_ younger self’s disappearance.” Draco smiled tenderly at him and traced a finger up his eyebrow. “We made our choice. I don’t want to go back.”  
  
And there was the secret, shameful truth, at the bottom of it all, dancing in the sunlight behind the latticed window of the small house they were renting in Portugal.  
  
“Neither do I,” Harry whispered.  
  
Draco flung his arms around him, and kissed him, and made a deliberate grinding motion with his foot. After a second, Harry figured out what he was doing, and imitated him. Together, they ground the _Daily Prophet_ into the dust.  
  
*  
  
The problem with being a mortal creature bound within time’s spiral and contemplating the endless spiral of the immortal is that, well, can the time one doesn’t touch and can’t comprehend really _matter_?  
  
All things are true. But you can’t experience all of them.  
  
So, bound within the spirals of the alicorn, it might be best to go with the one in front of you.  
  
Or close your eyes, reach your hand out, and choose the one you want to believe in.  
  
Perhaps you will end up with brilliant, elemental shards of the truth, and that might be the best choice you can make.   
  
If all things are true.  
  
 **The End.**


End file.
